3. In an essay, identify the theme Helen Keller offers in The Story of My Life about learning and discuss how she develops this
theme. Then, describe the narrator's character arc as she learns. Finally, select two strong words or phrases in the text and identify their connotations. Also discuss how these connotations contribute to the theme or the narrator's character arc. Be sure to cite or describe specific details from the text to support your ideas. (30 points).
In The Story of my Life by Helen Keller, the author tells her experiences as she tries to fit in the world as a blind and deaf person. Helen starts the story by describing her earliest life experiences of sights and sounds and her memory of contracting the disease that ended up in her impairment. Helen learned sign language after her disease, but she describes the isolation she felt from the world around her and the frustration she experienced while trying to learn.
At the age of six, Helen’s life changes drastically when she is taken to a teacher who has had great success educating blind and deaf children. Helen uses the rest of the book to describing her advancing learning to read, write, and speak under the tutoring of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. She describes the sensory work Miss Sullivan did that helped her first steps, and then learn the meaning of words, and then gain a whole understanding of their meaning in the world around her. Helen describes moments of insight that came over the course of her learning as she was able to link her learning activities to her childhood memories. By the end of the book, the author’s descriptions of past and present give a meaning to her story.
